The platform didn’t gain the traction needed and now that the national election cycle has calmed down, the team is staring down a pivot.

“It was just the realities of keeping the doors open,” said Lucas, who is still in his day job teaching chemistry at Sto-Rox High School. “It was all these little costs that pop up, insurance, hosting, investor coffee and luncheons. The cost of doing business for a bootstrapping startup in the city is just very expensive.”

You also lose some of the youthful exuberance and begin to think honestly and creatively about the product, he said.

With a more critical eye toward revenue, Red Blue Voice is taking its community building and crowdsourcing ideas that were part of the original concept and making them front and center.

Doing business as Crowdasaurus, the new concept is essentially a private-label crowdfunding platform that can be run by corporations, academic institutions or other communities.

In order to make a more successful crowdfunded campaign, Lucas said it makes sense to try to pair projects with some type of partner, whether its a media company that runs the platform or an academic institution that runs the platform to crowdsource funding from within its existing community.

“We think that this makes sense because of the high failure rate with Kickstarter and Indiegogo,” he said. According to the Kickstarter website there have been 82,974 projects launched with a success rate of 43.6 percent.

The timing also felt right, he said, since the rules around crowdsourcing are changing with last year’s passage of the federal Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, of JOBS Act. Under rules, that are still being written by the Securities and Exchange Commission, crowdfunding sites will be able to offer equity to these online investors. Currently, investors from crowdfunding sites receive swag and early products from the project they fund. Lucas wants the company to be ready to capitalize on the momentum that is expected once those rules do change.

The new product is launching in late February with an undisclosed media partner, Lucas said. However, the team is still looking for other organizations interested in the product.

The core team is still five people, Lucas said. Discussions about a pivot were already starting last fall ahead of the election. “Red Blue Voice never caught on to the degree we needed to,” he said and the company needed to generate revenue since fundraising wasn’t successful.

Since changing focus, Lucas said the company is finding more success with presale progress. “Things are in a good place right now, which I couldn’t have told you two months ago.”

One of the hard realities to face, Lucas said, was realizing he had fallen into the traps all the entrepreneurship and startup blogs had warned him about.

Specifically, they were spending money unnecessarily.

“We bought some things we didn’t need to buy, contracted work we didn’t need to contract. Instead of focusing on a sellable product we were spending money on peripheral marketing and things that didn’t get us where we needed to get,” he said.